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Jim has been hard at work putting together this week’s Skeptic Circle. While not normally a reader, I was led to it by my habitual reading of his blog. The presentation is ingenious–we’ve come to expect from that from Jim. It makes me wonder: what happened to Smarter than I?
Found in the midst of the rabble-rousing was this post on philosopher of science’s Michael Ruse’s interview with Salon (free day-pass required) where he discusses issues from his new book. While obviously no friend of intelligent design, Ruse’s position is simply that both intelligent design and evolution are ‘worldviews’ that operate essentially as religions. Some excerpts (which are all Ruse’s words):
Also interesting are the comments from the post where I found Ruse’s interview:
Okay – science and theology can never directly contradict one another, since science can only consider nature and God, by definition, is outside nature. Fine – but then what is theology, exactly? The study of something that can’t be studied? Inquiry into something that can’t be inquired into? Research in a subject that is incapable of being researched? An ology that has no ology? It has to be. Because if ‘God’ is by definition outside of nature, then we (who are well and truly inside nature) don’t and can’t – by definition – know anything or find out anything about it. Obviously.
The commenter reminds me why I love theology–because it admits that man has a transcendental aspect to him, that he actually is able to know Him who is ‘beyond nature’ (whatever ‘nature’ is). God’s existing outside space and time only means renders Him unknowable if we are limited to knowing things that exist in space and time. Once again, we meet the tyranny of the empirical.
Matthew Lee Anderson is an Associate Professor of Ethics and Theology in Baylor University's Honors College. He has a D.Phil. in Christian Ethics from Oxford University, and is a Perpetual Member of Biola University's Torrey Honors College. In 2005, he founded Mere Orthodoxy.